yes, someone has definitely deleted the User Homes folder and this is throwing a wrench into the system. You need to disable home folder creation in alfresco-global.properties (property home.folder.creation.disabled = true), restart and re-create the expected folder (you need to use JavaScript API to get the child name right - a simple create folder / space won't suffice) before you can start your system normally again.

Hi Axel, I do have the same problem. This happened when I upgraded an Alfresco 3.0.0 to the latest 5.2

My user homes is called: app:company_home/cm:user_homes/

I have tried for a day now to get the namespace switched from cm: to app: (which is what it is looking for) using the Javascript API but without success. I also tried to recreate the folder but can't get it to be app: ....

Do you have any tips on how I could solve this? Thanks a lot in advance.

Using the JavaScript API you will have a hard time changing the QName of the child association to app:user_homes as the API includes some "convenience features" that often default to using the cm: prefix.

You best bet might be to simply do a quick&dirty update to the DB directly. Stop Alfresco, make a DB backup, and update the corresponding entry in the alf_child_assoc table. You only have to update the qname_ns_id to the value for the "http://www.alfresco.org/model/application/1.0" namespace URL (you can determine the ID from the alf_namespace table).

In case anybody else runs into this issue here is what is needed to fix it:

- As Axel said: fix the corresponding alf_child_assoc entry and set the qname_ns_id to the "app" id, which can be found in alf_namespace. For me this was the following update: update alf_child_assoc set qname_localname = "user_homes", qname_ns_id = 7 where id = 21; You find the correct id by using the node browser in Alfresco and traversing the database.

- The next step is also important: Reindex everything. Rebuild your solr4 index or it won't find anything still.

- The last step for me was to rename the "User Homes" folder to something else and back to "User Homes". Without this step it would not work for me, I tried for hours and found this by accident.

So perform these 3 steps to fix that error if your User Home is not working correctly.